THE GARGOULETTES are the water flutes. There are two kinds. One is made out of elder wood. They are like pipes. The other is made out of glazed earth. They are like pitchers, and they imitate bird songs.
With little gargoulettes, you can very easily hunt quail or any bird with a trilling song. They imitate them, they call to them, they sound exactly like the female. But the gargoulettes the shepherds use are very big. Their song is at once bird song and horse whinny. Ten men blowing hard into ten gargoulettes can make music that turns you to salt. You have only enough time to raise your eyes to search the sky for a flying winged horse.
The instrument isn’t beautiful, just a pipe or a pitcher, and it takes enormous breath to move and puncture water. The players bind their cheeks with a handkerchief or a scarf. Gargoulette music has great power over animals. After just a little, it makes them mad for love, females as well as males. It has the power of springtime. Extending from where a man plays a gargoulette alone on a hill, you can see the rays afterwards, the marks in the grass of all the love struggles of beasts who heard him. They radiate out like the spokes of a wheel.
So there is the whole orchestra. Above, on the ridge, the wind harps, here, next to the stage, the tympon and gargoulette players. This time, there were twelve of them. Everything is invention, even in the music. They don’t play traditional tunes. They set off in a flurry, without knowing where they are going, improvising on their own sounds. Before beginning, they say, “With us, you are going to travel far!” And then they play.
So this is what I myself saw in all that. The harps make the sound of the earth which rolls along over the routes of the sky; the tympons, the sound of men, words and steps, and the sound of beating hearts; the gargoulettes, the sound of the beasts who are born, make love, bellow, and die. All that as if, all of a sudden, you had the ears of a god.
AS FOR the actors, first of all, there’s the Sardinian. The Sardinian, well, he’s at the very center of the stage, and he’s the one who begins. The others are there, mixed in with the audience; they aren’t designated in advance. They are there just to lean toward their neighbors to tell them, “Wait till you hear what I’ve got to say!”
The Sardinian cannot go on any longer. He calls, “The Sea,” for example. And, all of a sudden, it’s someone near you who begins to answer. Everyone shouts to him, “Stand up, stand up!”
He stands up, he goes over, he stands facing the Sardinian, he answers. Only then you know that the one whose velour elbows rubbed against your side was the Sea, was really the sea; he has its voice and soul. When he has finished, he stays there. He has taken his place among the elements. There are even some who won’t ever leave their elemental rank; they’ll remain all their lives as the the Sea, the River, the Woods. It’ll be said that the Sea has claimed his pasture to the left of Seyne, or that the River will come down tomorrow, because one night they were so much that sea and that river that they can never again be called by their father’s name, but only by the name of what they are.
The one who has finished speaking remains there with the Sardinian. Another one comes, speaks, then falls silent, and then, he takes the hand of the man who was there before him and he waits. At the end of the play, there is a whole wreath of big homespun men holding each other’s hands.
All that happens on stage are steps and greetings, steps to take up one’s position, greetings to the Sardinian. As for the rest, it’s the words that must show it, and the man who speaks remains still, his arms dangling. There are just two or three places where there is some stage action, always very simple, but occurring at the very height of the pathos. These will be indicated in the play’s translation on the following pages.
Written down, the text presents in translation a chaos of bristling and tragic words. Tragic, because I sense all their dense beauty and because I am hopeless before them. The language is the most wild type of sea jargon, made up of Provençal, Genoese, Corsican, Sardinian, Niçoise, Old French, Piedmontese, and words invented on the spot as needed. It is a marvelous instrument for epic drama: cries and howls themselves can be long narratives. The imitative harmony is such that gestures are superfluous as the procession of the planets, the rocking of the sea, the drenched course of the land losing its oceans in space all suddenly appear before the stunned listener. I say this to make your mouth water, but you’ll find nothing of all that in my translation. I’ve done my best to put it into very faulty French, but the language of free men is a leaping beast and, here, I’ve only forced open the bars of the cage a little.
May I be forgiven.
V
NIGHT. DISTANT SAINT-JEAN FIRES are eating away at the whole circle of the horizon.
The Mallefougasse plateau. Four fires at the corners of a square of grazed earth. Next to each flame, a man is standing, a heavy branch of leaves in his hand. All around this lit clearing, the night, and just at the edges of the night, like bubbling foam, the shepherds are seated in their mantles, their overcoats, their big velour jackets.
The Sardinian. He stands up. He looks to the right, and then to the left, and, at the same time, there is silence to the right and then to the left.
“So, should we begin?”
Just at that moment, without any other command but that silence, the wind descends, worked by the harps. The flutes begin to play the sound of a man who is walking in the sea.
THE SARDINIAN (He moves forward to the middle of the clearing; raises his hand in greeting). Listen, shepherds:
The worlds were in the god’s net 1 like tuna in the madrague:
Flips of the tail and foam; a sound that rang out, expelling the wind from every side.
The god was in the sky up to his knees.
From time to time, he leaned over, he took some sky in his hands. It ran between his fingers. It was white as milk. It was full of creatures like a huge stream of ants. And in it, images became clear and then faded like things in dreams.
The god washed his whole body with the sky. Slowly, to get used to life’s cold. He had a sensitive belly. Because everything was created in his belly.
Afterwards, he began to walk into the sky until he was out of his depths, where he could no longer touch, and he began to swim. His huge hand rose and dipped like a spoon; his great feet dug like pickaxes with nails in front. He was followed all along by a swirl of ripped up grasses. After a little while, he was far off over there, no more than an island amidst the spray.
He went off because the beginning was finished.
Blood! Clots of blood!
The earth is crouching 2 in the belly of the sky like a child in its mother.
It is in the blood and the guts. It hears life, all around, which is roaring like fire.
A blue vein enters its head like a snake. That is how it is filled with its kindness.
A red artery enters its chest. That is how it is filled with its meanness.
It grows thicker. The more it thickens, the more light it has.
Finally, it presses against the portal. It wants to be born. It is heavy with the reason of its seed.
Suddenly, in a jet of fire it is born and it takes off.